Exactly What It Looks Like
by Queen of the Castle
Summary: Less Than Dignified Escapes series Part 4. "Run?" the Doctor begged, glancing worriedly in the direction where they both knew that Jackie Tyler's ever-ready slapping hand was just waiting for an excuse like this. Rose/Ten II.


Series: This is the fourth and FINAL part of the Less Than Dignified Escapes Series, which consists of the following fics:

Impractical Shoes (and Other Assorted Articles of Clothing)

Unexpected Kidnappings and Enforced Nudity

Once More, With Nakedness

***Exactly What It Looks Like

* * *

"You know," Rose said, "we really need to find you some more shirts, pronto. You've got terrible B.O."

The Doctor gaped. "And everyone keeps telling me that _I'm _the rude one," he spluttered. "I'm part human now. I age like a human. I have one heart and inefficient bodily functions like a human. I can't help it if I suddenly sweat like a human, too."

"Sure you can." Rose smirked. "It's called deodorant and a change of clothes."

The Doctor sent a beseeching look her way. "You're not going to make me go shopping, are you? You know how I hate shopping. And we'll only come out of it with maybe two new shirts that I actually liked, so I'll have to keep wearing them over and over, and eventually that'll mean that we'll have to go shopping _again _to track down some more clothes, and don't you think we could just skip all that hassle?"

Rose rolled her eyes. "For someone who seems to always be livin' with one woman or another, you really haven't picked up our habits at all, have you? Except for the whining. You'd definitely beat out any female I know at that. Complaints at fifty paces? You'd be a shoe-in."

"I don't whine," the Doctor whined.

"Sure," Rose teased. "Whatever you say. Anyways, for once you're in luck. We don't have to go shoppin' at all. We've already got everythin' we need right here."

"How's that?"

When Rose opened the door into what an optimist would have called a wardrobe room (and anyone else would have called a landfill or, if they were feeling particularly kind that day, an enormous washing hamper), the Doctor gaped.

"But... it's..."

"Like the one on the TARDIS," Rose said. "Yep. Not as big or anythin', mind – can only do so much with things that aren't bigger on the inside – but the basics are there."

"Why?"

Rose shrugged. "A few months after I got stuck here, after... well, after Bad Wolf Bay that first time, Pete asked me what he could do to make this place feel more like home to me. This was a start."

"This is brilliant!" the Doctor laughed, looking around.

Rose shrugged, trying not to look too concerned. "Most of it's just from charity shops and stuff. It's really nothin' much."

The Doctor met her eyes. "It's _brilliant_," he repeated seriously.

Rose allowed a proud smile to inch across her face. "Yeah?"

"Yep," the Doctor said, bounding into the room. "So, where can I find shirts?"

Rose looked around. "It's not in any sort of order or anythin', so you'll just have to dive in. More fun that way, anyways."

"_'I'll' _have to?" the Doctor repeated, sounding affronted. "More like 'we' will!"

"We?" Rose asked, raising her eyebrows.

"You don't think I'm just going to let you just stand back and mock me while I act like a fashion model for you all on my own, do you? No, if I've got to do this, so do you. Ha!"

"I'm not the one who smells," Rose pointed out.

"Sure you do," the Doctor said, smiling. "You smell like vanilla and grass and anti-perspirant and female human and essence of Rose Tyler. At least, that's what I remember from when I still had my handy super-strength Time Lord sense of smell. Now I can just barely smell your perfume, and I'm not even really sure what exactly _that_smells like. It's a bit rubbish being human, isn't it? I don't know how you've put up with it for..." He frowned, looking uncertain.

"Twenty-four years," Rose supplied.

The Doctor looked pained. "It was four whole years for you?" he asked.

Rose nodded, knowing that she looked about as uncomfortable as he did. "A bit more. Nearer to five, actually."

"See," the Doctor said, trying to look light-hearted but sort of completely _failing_, actually. "If I had those Time Lord senses still, I could have figured out that for myself. Maybe. If I was having a good day. All right, so I probably would've got it completely wrong. I was never really good at getting the time right. As you probably noticed, what with the twelve months instead of twelve hours that one time. You couldn't even imagine how often that sort of thing made me the butt of everyone's jokes on Gallifrey."

"Gallifrey?" Rose asked.

The Doctor's eyes widened. "Oh! I, er, I never mentioned my planet's name to you?"

For the first time, Rose really started to understand just how difficult this whole thing might be. She'd lived four years away from him, and that was bad enough. But he'd had a whole life – nine hundred years worth of life, in fact – before she'd ever made an appearance in it. While the Doctor was well aware of many of the details of her childhood and rebellious teenage years, all Rose knew of his life before her were the tiny little snippets of information he occasionally let her in on when he either forgot himself for a moment or was in his version of a sharing mood.

The silence between them stretched uncomfortably until the Doctor cleared his throat and said, "Anyway."

Rose had a sense of déjà vu, remembering another time when he'd fobbed off what should have been an important conversation that way. The sort of conversation that they really needed to have about now, actually.

Well, no one ever said that the two of them couldn't utilise avoidance tactics with the best of them.

So, instead, Rose merely plucked a tan jacket with a ridiculous amount of fringe hanging off various parts of it from the nearest clothing rack and tossed it at him.

"Try that on," she said, forcing a grin.

"_This_?" the Doctor asked, his face screwing up slightly in distaste. He looked askance at the jacket he was holding gingerly between his index finger and thumb as if it was somehow contaminated.

"That," Rose insisted. She plucked a pair of boots from nearby and waved them at him. "You're the one who wanted me to play dress-up with you, remember? So I get to decide the first outfit."

"I don't remember ever offering to 'play dress-up'," the Doctor grumbled just loudly enough for Rose to make out the words.

"See?" Rose said. "Whining again."

The Doctor shot her a sour look, but disappeared off behind a rack to get changed nonetheless. Rose grabbed a chequered button-up shirt and a short denim skirt and shucked her own clothes, replacing them with her impromptu cowgirl outfit. She would have even done her hair in two side braids to complete the look if she'd had time, but the Doctor interrupted by reappearing wearing the jacket.

Wearing _only _the jacket, in fact. The jacket which just barely fell to the tops of his thighs.

He looked ridiculous, of course – hard not to, wearing a jacket like that – but at the same time...

"I, uh... I sorta meant for you to find somethin' else to... to wear _with _it," Rose said, flustered.

The Doctor looked down at himself. "Oh, right," he said, sounding embarrassed. "Yes. Of course. I'll just," he gestured behind him, "go. Away. And get dressed."

"No!" Rose said, and forced herself not to blush at how eager she'd sounded for him to remain under-dressed. "I mean, it's a certainly a look, I'll give you that," she said quickly. "Jack'd appreciate the sight."

"Says the girl wearing _those boots_."

Rose thought she finally understood Doctor-speak well enough to interpret that that meant something along the lines of, 'Wow, Rose Tyler, those boots make you look so unbearably hot that I'd like to bend you over the nearest surface and do unspeakably dirty things to you'. Well, maybe it didn't mean _exactly _that, but a girl could embellish a little, couldn't she? It wasn't as if he'd ever say anything like that out loud, anyway.

"What d'you think?" Rose said. She walked towards him, swaggering ridiculously. "Do I look like a farm-hand?"

The Doctor caught her around the waist when she nearly tripped over in her four-sizes-too-large boots.

"Don't really have the walk down, I guess," she said, her laugh going slightly breathy at the suddenly close proximity of him. _Him_. The Doctor. The Doctor who had no pants on, specifically. Rose's continued efforts not to blush flew right out the window about then.

"I don't think you should run off to the country any time soon, no," the Doctor said.

"Well, no," Rose agreed. "Why would I wanna? Too many reasons to stay right here."

"Right _here_?" the Doctor asked, looking around pointedly. "In this exact spot?"

Since this exact spot included her being pressed from knee to shoulder against the Doctor's warmer-than-it-used-to-be body, Rose rather thought that sounded just about perfect, actually.

"Maybe," she said. "If I had to. I mean, I guess there might be worse places to –"

She was interrupted (quite rudely, she decided) by a pair of lips trailing across hers. She leaned into him, her hands finding spots on the backs of his shoulders where they seemed to fit perfectly. She made a completely embarrassing noise of loss when he pulled away slightly.

She was pretty sure that her blush, and the sense of mortification that provoked it, was never going to fade at this rate.

"So, worse places to be?" the Doctor asked lowly.

"Mmm," Rose mumbled. "Maybe one or two. I mean, this here is pretty much _torture_, so it's a hard call."

The Doctor nibbled on her lower lip. He had nine hundred years of practice, ostensibly, so it shouldn't have been a surprise that he was so good at that. Rose thought that it _mightn't_ have been if he hadn't been _the Doctor_, and therefore completely rubbish at any and all things to do with romance (usually, at least, though he wasn't doing so badly just now). She somehow couldn't see the Doctor being some great Casanova of time and space, really. He'd probably get interrupted in the middle of every seduction by an alien invasion. Or maybe he'd just fall over his own shoelaces part-way through.

"You're laughing at me," the Doctor accused, pulling away as she continued to giggle.

"Yeah, sorta," Rose said. "But you like it when I laugh, right?"

The Doctor didn't really have a retort for that, especially since Rose had just flicked the button of his jacket that she'd been toying with open and was sliding her fingers down to give the next one the same treatment. Rose thought, from the look on his face, that the Doctor might quite like it when she did _that _as well.

"I..." the Doctor breathed. "I haven't..."

Rose stopped, meeting his eyes. He looked uncertain. She thought that it was completely insane that a man who could stand up to the worst alien armies in the whole of time and space without blinking was made _that_uncomfortable just by the first hints of being undressed by a woman he'd (finally!) admitted to being in love with.

"You said you'd 'danced' before," Rose reminded him.

The Doctor nodded. "I have. 'Course I have. But, well, not in _this_body. Or in the last one, come to that. Things are different with each regeneration. I don't know if I'll be –"

"Doesn't matter. We'll figure it out," Rose said quickly. Then she had a terrible thought. "As long as... you do _want _to, right?"

The Doctor brought his hands up to _her _shirt buttons as he pressed the front of his body more solidly against her. Oh, she thought. That made things clear.

"Do I even need to answer that?" the Doctor asked.

"Not so much, no," Rose gasped.

They both sprang into action, practically tearing the cheap clothes off each other as they kissed. They staggered about a bit, trying to shed their clothing as quickly as possible while still keeping their balance and not separating their mouths. Just staying upright was quite the achievement, Rose thought.

Rose eventually pulled away to gasp in a proper breath just as her shirt fell away from her. "If you don't hurry up and –"

"Rose, sweetheart, you in there?" her Mum called out, her voice getting slightly louder (closer, Rose realised) with each syllable.

"Oh, you've gotta be _kiddin' _me," Rose whispered, taking a second to note the Doctor's complete nakedness and her own not-exactly-respectable outfit, which was composed solely of a frilly pink bra, a tiny skirt and cowgirl-cum-hooker boots. Although, given the deer-in-the-headlights expression that the Doctor was suddenly sporting, her Mum wouldn't have even needed to see their state of undress to be well aware what they'd been up to.

"Run?" the Doctor begged, glancing worriedly in the direction where they both knew that Jackie Tyler's ever-ready slapping hand was just waiting for an excuse like this.

Rose barely even had time to nod before they were tearing off through the maze of the room, practically knocking over the clothing rails as they went. Rose nearly fell over in her too-large boots, but the Doctor's grip on her hand kept her steady enough to manage. Between her Mum catching her half-naked and clearly about to have sex with the Doctor, or the potential for a sprained ankle due to her bad choice of footwear, Rose would take the ankle. Any day. She might be well and truly an adult by now, but there were some fears she'd never quite grow out of.

The two of them burst through the door at the opposite end of the room, nearly knocking over one of the members of the house's extensive staff.

Rose pulled the Doctor down the hall and around the corner, but not quite quickly enough to avoid the cleaner getting a very full view of the Doctor's naked bum as it retreated away from her. Once out of sight, the Doctor and Rose leaned against the wall to catch their breath, though Rose found it particularly difficult to do so through her hysterical laughter.

"It's not funny. That woman just saw me naked! Completely, absolutely, one hundred percent _naked_!" the Doctor hissed.

"Still better than that time pretty much an entire town did, isn't it?" she giggled. "How is it that we can be in a room chock full of clothes and still end up undressed when we have to run for our lives? We must have the worst luck in history or somethin'."

"But she's going to think that we were..." the Doctor began, and then trailed off with an embarrassed flush.

Rose grinned. "Yep. She is. And you know what? For once, it was _exactly _what it looked like."

"But she'll tell your mother!" the Doctor said urgently, as if that was the most horrifying concept he'd ever had to face in his long life.

"Justine?" Rose snickered. "Not likely. She's just about as scared of my Mum as you are. This universe's Jackie Tyler wasn't particularly nice to her, I guess. They're not exactly gossip buddies."

"But..." the Doctor still sounded uncertain.

"C'mon," Rose said. "My room's this way."

The Doctor, flabbergasted, looked at her like _she_was the mad one for not seeming to care more.

Rose sighed. "Look, I've been waitin' nearly _seven years_, here. So if you don't hurry up and tear off the rest of my clothes, _I'm _gonna be the one to tell my Mum that you were about to do deliciously naughty things to her daughter."

_That_ made him spring into action. Rose ended up having to follow him to her room, in the end. ("No, Doctor, it's _that _way!")

That wasn't so bad, she reflected, when it meant that she could arrive at her doorway only to find the Doctor already waiting, naked, on her bed for her.

Yeah, she thought, it really had been for the best to leave the serious discussions for some other time. Some things were just so much more urgent.

~FIN~


End file.
